The present invention relates to network switches, and more specifically, to simulating an EEPROM in virtual distributed switches.
Typically EEPROM devices on physical switches may be used for storing configuration information and other critical data that must survive a reboot. Typically EEPROM data is stored directly as a data structure, which may be loaded and unloaded as needed from EEPROM into memory. On a physical switch, firmware in two different image slots, for example, image1 and image2 slots may be independent of each other even though they share a command data storage location for configuration. Thus data for image1 may not be available for the image2 slot.
When porting network operating systems designed for physical switches over to virtual distributed switch environments, an EEPROM device may not be available since the EEPROM is a physical device while the virtual switch is software. Current known solutions may involve modifying the network operating system to write the EEPROM data out to a file. This may require significant modification to the existing network operating system code as well as significant testing and debugging. EEPROM data are usually designed to be stored outside of regular system storage. Configuration file solutions may place the EEPROM data and the configuration in the same place, leading to potential corruption.